Innovative RPG app YARPS goes into hibernation

Geek Native wrote about the YARPS Kickstarter in November last year and noted it was a rare thing. YARPS is/was a RPG app with Kickstarter success.

YARPS is one of those online systems that let you track campaigns, manage your notes, character sheets and keep your GM brain together. It also had help for players and, I thought, was full of great features such as the portrait generator.

Now Kickstarter backers are being offered their money back.

In a heartfelt and transparent blog post called YARPS is in trouble, we hear, again, the familiar story of COVID-19 taking a slice out of a business’ main finances, employees being hit by difficulties and projects like YARPS suffering.

The team, however, has no plans to kill YARPS off. Any data you have in the system is safe.

For now, at least. The team is putting the project into hibernation while they wait for the situation to improve. A start-up grant from the Federal German Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy might change the situation overnight, but it’s a waiting game.

At the moment we do not intend to shut down the YARPS Prototype in its current state. All your instances will be accessible for you until further notice, which is at the very least until the end of 2020, but most likely also after that date. Even if we should have to shut down the YARPS Prototype at some point in the future, your data will be safe! We will never delete your data unless you explicitly tell us to, and if we ever absolutely have to restrict access to your instances, we will definitely provide you with an opportunity to export all your data first.

If you’re a Kickstarter backer and the lack of development on the program is a hideous affront to you; you can get your money back. Needless to say, the team hopes you won’t do that.

If you decide to stay with us nonetheless, you’d have our gratitude—and the gratitude of all future YARPS users—for believing in our project.

YARPS, in a better time, had been making waves with partnerships with the likes of Ulisses Spiel and Pinnacle Entertainment Group as a Savage Worlds licensed product.